Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

SchrodingerZ writes "Just in time to miss the 100-year anniversary of the fatal voyage of the Titanic, Australian mining billionaire Clive Palmer announced he has plans to recreate the Titanic, calling it Titanic II. 'It will be every bit as luxurious as the original Titanic but of course it will have state-of-the-art 21st Century technology and the latest navigation and safety systems,' says Palmer. He stated it was to be as close to the original as possible, with some modern adjustments. Its maiden voyage is set for 2016."

It would be nice to take a sail on such stylish, vintage ship. I hope they also have dress codes for women so they will wear vintage dresses. After having a nice dinner I will take some nice lady to her room and draw her naked. Then have sex with her in a vintage car. And die after we crash into New Zealand.

I'd fly on a replica Hindenburg in a heartbeat. Especially if it could be filled with helium, as it was originally designed for. But hell, I'd take my chances with hydrogen and a smoking lounge for the thrill of it.

(The US controlled the world's supply of helium, and they were worried about military uses of Zeppelins, so they wouldn't sell any to Germany at the time.)

I have had a healthy amount of sex at Renaissance Faires - little known secret, the girls there are geeks! Partying geeks! I swear it's like the last days of Rome there, at least at the Maryland one...

Aw I don't know man - the MD one is all girls from DC that are there getting their geek on - you'd be pleasantly surprised at the amount of talent rolling around there. Do yourself a favor and check it out - Aug to Oct. You'll thank me...:)

I hope they also have dress codes for women so they will wear vintage dresses.

Yes, this is an interesting issue. As I recall the titanic was originally designed for Extreme separation of the classes, it would almost be physically impossible for steerage class and first class to ever see each other. However, the modern trend is for uniclass, with at most a slight variation in rooms which you never spend any time in anyway, as I saw on my honeymoon cruise some years ago.

I predict much heartache, because every walmart shopping, tramp stamp wearing, pork rind munching bubbette is gonna expect she will be in first class, so she's either gonna be disappointed when she spends her cruise in steerage with, perhaps at most, a guided tour of the 1st class digs, or, she's going to be all wound up about having to pack 13 pairs of shoes because clearly the grand dining room is not going to accept thongs and flipflops in its dress code. Or she tolerates all the packing and getting dressed up and goes to the fancy dinner hoping for movie re-enactment scenes where everyone dressed up as much as herself, only to find it overrun by hoodies.

As for the guys, all we want in a cruise ship is bikini suntanning area on the main deck and clothing optional tanning on the upper deck, which unfortunately does not fit the original plans as far as I know. So this will be boring.

My cruise experience showed a bimodal distribution of ages, where about 1/3 where 20-something honeymooners like my wife and myself, and 2/3 were extreme senior citizens. I can see how they needed to wait 100 years for todays oldest cruiser who was just a kid during the original Titanic sinking to have died off.

Another interesting economic question, "is the scale of Titanic" correct for the modern era?

Titanic:Length: 882 ft 6 inBeam: 92 ft

Costa Concordia:Length: 952 ft 1 inBeam: 116 ft 6 in

Queen Mary 2:Length: 1,132 ftBeam: 147.5 ft

As far as "upscale" goes the QM2, is probably near the top today. Even an affordable cruise is typically a bigger ship, Concordia class, than Titanic. While a Concordia is not much bigger, if you going to book some time on fancy floating palace don't you want to be on the very biggest? Was that not part of the Titanic's initial draw?

RMS Titanic was only 46,328 gross tons (true displacement 52,310 tons). That's less than one-third the size of the QM2 (148,528 gross tons).

Titanic is a fairly small ship by today's standards. "Average" in the current market would be 60,000 to 110,000 gross tons. Ships in the 50,000 ton class are being retired or sold off at 15 years old because they aren't profitable enough compared to the big things. (Celebrity's "Horizon" and "Zenith", for example.)

Ships in the 50,000 ton class are being retired or sold off at 15 years old because they aren't profitable enough compared to the big things. (Celebrity's "Horizon" and "Zenith", for example.)

(Posting AC since still at work...)

Depends on the market... it would suck trying to run a mid-sized ship in the hot markets (Caribbean/Mexican, Alaskan, Mediterranean, etc). On the other hand, it would hold up pretty good in the lesser-traveled markets, and given the iconic design and historical cache', the North Atlantic and possibly North Sea or North American Seaboard (New England, Canada, etc) runs would serve it pretty well.

Dunno - given the niche appeal, and the fact that not too many folks are going to really go for a cruise on the North Atlantic otherwise, it's actually not a bad size. Bigger would mean it would likely lack rooms. Smaller would mean that you couldn't pack all the modern amenities (shops, casino, et al) into it.

That last part is a bit important - the original ship was built only to get people from one side of the ocean to the other. Nowadays, cruises are more for pleasure, where back then they were merely for transportation. Adding the things that make a cruise modern (and profitable!) such as shops and casinos are going to eat space (the original already had a gym, a spa, and a few other goodies, including the first oceangoing swimming pool).

Actually, you could put the nude tanning section on the roof of the First-Class Lounge. [wikimedia.org], which IIRC was accessible to First Class passengers at the time. Just a thought.

OTOH, if you have ever sailed the North Atlantic, at any time of year, you'd know that no sane human being would want to wear a bikini, given the consistent high winds and relatively low temperatures (there's a reason icebergs were hanging around in that region in April, after all...)

In fairness to the engineers of the original Titanic (and her sister ships), the "unsinkable" nature of the ship was mainly in regards to ordinary leaks and minor structural failures that may happen from time to time. A lousy pilot might damage a part of the hull, but the ship was designed to withstand that kind of general damage. There were very efficient bilge pumps and the various sections of the ship were designed to keep water out.... something that did allow the ship to stay afloat for nearly an hour after it hit the iceberg.

That there were shortcomings in the design is true as well, and something that came from the accident investigation review board that was convened after the original RMS Titanic sank. Still, it was a generally sound design that was used for the original Titanic and as noted the general design did prove to be rather successful as long as general precautions were taken. The Titanic investigation review board also set the pattern for subsequent engineering failures in the future, including the loss of both American Space Shuttles (Columbia and Challenger) as well as the failure of the Tacoma Narrows "Galloping Gertie" Bridge, and for that matter almost every major airline crash investigation. These engineering/transportation investigations usually lead to new regulations, but they also help advance the state of technology in terms of knowing what not to do... something that is sadly learned from experience more often that common sense would make you hope.

Although the compartments were called watertight, they were actually only watertight horizontally; their tops were open and the walls extended only a few feet above the waterline [Hill, 1996]. If the transverse bulkheads (the walls of the watertight compartments that are positioned across the width of the ship) had been a few feet taller, the water would have been better contained within the damaged compartments.

It was only a disaster because of the rescue efforts back in that era and the lack of life boats, as it was assumed it would not sink.If you want to say the design was flawed for it's ability to react to emergency situations such AS sinking after said ship as begun to sink. I'd agree with you.

However there is no flaw that caused it to sink more so than any other vessal.

If you want to say the design was flawed for it's ability to react to emergency situations such AS sinking after said ship as begun to sink.

There may be an argument that the design was flawed in its maneuvering capacity to avoid, say, icebergs, given the visibility conditions that could reasonably be expected to occur on the route for which it was designed, and that, but for that design flaw, the design flaws impacting post-collision safety might not have been dramatically desmonstrated.

Well, from what I understand is that it's manuvering capability was sufficient, the problem was a mirage like affect created by atmospheric distortion on the water, making objects appear above the horizon and far away, making the iceberg literally invisible on the silhouette of the night.

I think the bigger problem was the captain's decision to run flat out, at night, in an attempt to surprise the press by arriving ahead of schedule. Had he taken reasonable precautions and slowed down a little there would have been more time to react.

No, what's hilarious is that a filthy rich guy plans on building a ship that was created during an economic downturn, filling it full of people, and then going on a long trip where... after it hits an iceberg, all the poor people will be locked below and the ship will sink, which is not in any way a parallel to today's economy where we are bailing out billionaires 'too big to fail', and setting people up for a lifetime of loan repayment and wage slavery.

Kylie Minogue didn't use the name "Titanic II", but her Doctor Who episode [wikipedia.org] features a luxury liner named the "Titanic" that is on a collision course with the earth, and will wipe out all life on the planet.

"Titanic II" may have flopped because it was too silly. But, "Voyage of the Damned" had 13+ million viewers. Clearly the secret was making it even more silly, adding Kylie Minogue, and marketing it to the British.

Do you not understand what "as close to the original as possible" means? Clearly that means they are aware there are parts of the original design that would not be possible to reproduce. Any parts of the original design which are no longer allowed for whatever reason would among them.

Do you not understand what "as close to the original as possible" means? Clearly that means they are aware there are parts of the original design that would not be possible to reproduce. Any parts of the original design which are no longer allowed for whatever reason would among them.

Yeah, I'm guessing "as close to the original as possible" means it will have four raked funnels and be painted black about 4-6 stories above the waterline; should be close enough to fool most cruise-goers.

Give it the same general shape and layout. Keep the iconic grand ballroom. Give it fake smokestacks.

But under water, give it a bulbous hull. Bow thrusters. Weld the thing together. Naturally, give it a proper rudder:)

Inside the ship, use the huge space freed up by the change in propulsion technology and the lack of demand for "steerage" to do more traditional cruise-ship things. Cabins should look old, but be brought up to modern standards... perhaps keep a few historically accurate for people who want such things.

They will probably want to make it a little bigger - the Titanic was big for it's day, but much smaller (about 1/3 the size in tonnage) of the Queen Mary 2. Mainly, it was too narrow - under 100 feet at it's widest. Queen Mary 2 is almost 150 feet wide. I think they could fatten it without giving up too much aesthetically. More room for lifeboats:)

Even the original Titanic had a fake smokestack. A modern ship would only need a single funnel. It simply wouldn't make sense to route the exhaust through 4 funnels when a single one would suffice - especially since even the original ship had a decorative funnel.

Are you suggesting more government regulation is the solution? What about the passengers' inalienable right to die a horrible death in the icy waters without the nanny-state commie lifeboats oppressing them? Why do you hate liberty?

I agree. Let the free market decide. If a company builds a ship with only enough life boats for half the people then the half of the people that die won't use that company again thereby correcting the problem.

Suppose your liner sank in the middle of the Atlantic in 1880 and everyone got in the life boats.

Then what?

You had no radio to contact any other ships, so you're just floating around in the water with very limited supplies and little chance of rescue. Unless you were lucky and some other ship saw you sink or saw any flares you were able to launch, the odds were that you would die a slow death waiting for help.

The Titanic was probably the first such sinking where there would have been a good chance of everyone surviving if they carried enough life boats. And people learned from that.

Actually, the atlantic shipping lanes were quite busy (even in the 1880s), which may have been part of the problem. They saw lifeboats as ferries from one ship to another, which was expected to arrive in short order.

Unless you were lucky and some other ship saw you sink or saw any flares you were able to launch, the odds were that you would die a slow death waiting for help.

Of course, in the case of the Titanic sinking, there was a ship, the Californian, that saw flares launched from the Titanic and from her lifeboats, and in fact the Californian tried to signal the Titanic using Morse lamps. The Titanic wasn't in the middle of nowhere, it was basically in the standard ship route from the UK to the US. So yes, it would have made a big difference to have enough lifeboats for everybody.

What killed many of the passengers was sheer human stupidity (in addition to the aforementione

Given the classism of the era, you almost expect them to have enough spots for the passengers above a certain level but basically exclude the steerage and other lower classes from rescue.

The only thing is that there were plenty of first class men who gave up their spot. Yes, losses were heavier in the steerage class.
For all of the classism of the era, there was also a "women and children first" ethic.

They were, but lifeboats were seen as ferries from on ship to another. The atlantic shipping lanes were busy enough that it seemed very unlikely that a sinking ship would be too far from other ships for this to be an option.

I think he's expecting the floating fail whale rather than having it sink underneath him. The "authentic dress up" crowd is going to be at the throats of the "just wanna wear my hoodie" crowd. The modern cruisers are going to be pissed off that its amenities are ancient. The traditionalists are going to be pissed off that it doesn't have genuine coal fueled steam engines and has too many lifeboats.

I would not be scared of being on board, but I sure as hell wouldn't want to be surrounded by pissed off peo

You jest, but it the hull is going to anything like the original shape, I suspect it will cost more than double that of a modern cruise ship. Modern ships are built in a modular manner, with many square bits with flat decks that are welded together. The Titanic was built old-styley, with continuously curved sides and decks. That's gonna cost some shamoolah.

He's having it built by a government-owned shipyard in China. One that has never built a passenger ship. Jinling builds large single-engine tankers, container ships, and RORO (roll-on, roll-off) vessels. Five shipyards in Finland, France, Italy, Germany, and South Korea build most of the passenger ships in the world, and Jinling isn't one of them.

He's having it built by a government-owned shipyard in China. One that has never built a passenger ship. Jinling builds large single-engine tankers, container ships, and RORO (roll-on, roll-off) vessels. Five shipyards in Finland, France, Italy, Germany, and South Korea build most of the passenger ships in the world, and Jinling isn't one of them.

This might not be as far fetched a decision as it first sounds.

Having experience with large Container ships and RORO's is perfect engineering practice for the dealing with the unique, shall we say, attributes, of the average American passenger.

There are some things so engrained in the human consciousness as bad or cursed and should not be brought up again, aside from reverence.Making a Liner called the Titanic 2 or Dirigible called the Hindenburg Zwei only stand to bring forth such horrific notions and blatantly invite self-fulfilling prophecy.

Sure, feel free to spit and damn "superstition" all you want, there is something to be said about the imaginings of a mass consciousness that can actually have an effect, if only on a purely psychosomatic level -- but that's all it takes to sink a ship all over again.

I find it ironic that Palmer, a mining billionaire, is trying to recreate the Titanic, while the entertainment billionaire James Cameron, who has done the most in the public eye with the Titanic in the past decade or so, is using his billions to mine asteroids (and arguably is doing more to potentially advance mankind in the process).

Not really when you know that he became a Billionaire due to another mining companies massive and stupid mistake (or possibly foul play), and originally became a mining millionaire by putting his inside status as a clerk in the Queensland government mines department to use (back when his boss was corrupt enough to end up doing time).This is also the fourth such stunt he's pulled so far this year (bought himself the title of "national living treasure", announced a huge new Casino in the middle of nowhere which isn't going to happen and accused the local Green party of being run by the CIA). He's a clown that has weaseled his way around the rules and laws that other people have to abide by and really has done little more than make a huge number of lawyers (he sues a lot) and himself rich.To sum up - Don King on a bad day is far less ridiculous.

He is saying "It will be every bit as luxurious as the original Titanic" and also "as similar as possible to the original Titanic in design and specifications".

But the Titanic design wouldn't be anything near luxurious in 2012. For starts not cabins except for the best first class cabins had bathrooms. Adding them to cabins would require a major redesign of the layout.

In 2012 no one would travel in the cabins from 2nd and 3rd classes.

The ship also won't have anything near the facilitates that's expected the

Not much detail in the article about how similar it would be to the original. I would hope that it would be "every bit as luxurious" as modern uniclass cruise ships which are more comfortable than first class was in the old Olympic class liners and Cunard queens. Today's passengers would probably prefer to have a bathroom in their own cabin rather than having to go down the hall.

I wonder what they're going to do below decks. Steerage accommodation probably wouldn't be much of a tourist attraction, unless

You mean "will Kate Winslet pose for you and then have sex with you in a classic car?" I doubt it. Unless they're really serious when they say the ship "will have 21st Century state-of-the-art technology".